Let's Just Get It Over
by Smidgie
Summary: Continuation of the "You Belong to Me" saga - sequel to "The Way You Think Of Me". Read the others first or you'll just think I'm crazy. Dark, insane, M. But Artemis and Holly kiss and make up... kinda...


Hello, everyone! Thank you all for reading and reviewing the first three stories in this messed-up little universe. The feedback I have received from you has been completely awesome and I love you all. :) So on that note...

Oh, nearly forgot the bloody disclaimer... Eoin Colfer owns all the pretties you see below. I do not. However, I am responsible for making them have sex. Take that, Eoin. Oh, and by the way, this is kinda not TTP compliant. Just so you know.

* * *

She does not know how she got here.

Oh, here here, that is well enough. Here here is a marketplace in a little village three hours north of Cairo, as the fairy flies of course. She is shielded and investigating rumours of a hidden sprite in the area. The intelligence, like nine tenths of what she receives these days, proves to be false within five minutes when a dozen Mud Men come at her with shotguns and the occasional farming implement. She escapes, of course, and flutters off back to Ireland, where the underground base that has become an odd kind of refuge is hidden.

But no. she does not know how events led to this situation, this world - gods, this universe which is impossibly alien and yet is familiar enough in a frightening way to disturb all of them, whether they admit to it or not. It has been years since she has seen Artemis, of course; she stubbornly refuses to calculate exactly how many years, nor the weeks and days and hours that compile those years. Time has not blunted the memories of him, and only the work she has committed herself with a dying woman's desperation drives away the recollections of his voice and skin and hands.

Her work is reconnaissance and retribution, dealing a little in death and a little in life in a pattern that feels sickeningly like dancing. She, and indeed the other survivors, have wandered so far from who they once were that the fleeting reminders are eerie and unnatural and feel like disdain for the dead. Once they would have rejoiced for their survival but the old team, as it were, is fractured and decayed, and their rival – their enemy – their foe –

Well. He used to be their friend.

She is lost in thought, almost home, when it happens. Her wings are steady and so is her pulse when the screams come through the speakers of her helmet, old LEP standards adhered to because there's no reason to anymore. She can hear screams, and the rattle of gunfire, and once this would have frightened and horrified her but not anymore because there is fire and steel where her heart used to be. She continues her flight, waiting for the inevitable, because she knows what this means.

He has found her. And he will not be able to resist either gloating or pleading, depending on how incensed he is. She finds it rather sad she knows him so well, but does not clamp down on the feelings welling up inside of her. Her love has always hurt him in the past. It would make no difference now.

And then the voice. Oh, ice cold, sweet, familiar voice, rasping through the speakers and reverberating against her heart. She could hear the tremors in it, his weakness, what it cost him to speak as though she was nothing to him.

"Hello, Holly."

The memories are knife sharp and suddenly closer than they have been in years. Chasing him and running from him, a cycle that had no plausible end, loving him and reviling him even as her heart wondered how long it had been since the two of them were whole. She had suffered without him, oh, yes. Physically and mentally and emotionally and every way under the sun and some that weren't. the memories for a time had driven her half mad, until she resorted to the cold comfort of her own hands, feeling the phantom pads of his thumbs over her nipples and his long, delicate fingers slipping inside her. Oh, she had suffered without him. She wonders how terrible it had been for him.

"Artemis," she breathes, hearing his sharp intake of breath - her love-hate, still at her mercy, even as she is at his. He does not speak, as though he cannot. And she is reminded, all too clearly, of how he had relied on her through those dark and turmoil-filled years; when it seemed the shreds of control he had left depended only on her little hands on his skin and her voice humming him into what little peace left to him. She feels pity, and loathes it, remembering all this man has done and trying so hard to pretend it was all his fault. "What have you done with them?" she asks, the steel back in her voice.

He laughs; it is a shadowy, rasping sound, as though he has forgotten how to. Odd. She's only been away from him a year or two, she thinks. Perhaps a little longer… perhaps five… perhaps ten. She marks time by the new scars added to her body, as she did with him. It seems everything in her life - what little is left of it - is defined by him. "Have you not missed me, Holly?" he questions, and flames ignite in her heart, swiftly rushing down her veins to warm every corner of her body.

"Haven't thought of you once," she snaps, a blatant lie if she ever told one. She is surprised to hear him chuckle; not that hollow, grating sound like a door being closed, but a true laugh. Small, but there. She wonders if this is the first time he's truly laughed since she left him.

"You are still the same," he replies, almost offhandedly.

"Did you want me to change?" she asks against her will, nearly-almost forgetting the reason he has called her, to gloat and to threaten, to try and instil in her some of the ache she has shed.

"Never," he replies, and it is almost enough to convince her, the intensity of it, the faint tremble in his voice… the single word so different to his usual pontificating. It recalls her to herself.

"Let them go, Artemis," she says evenly, quietly, the iron control in her voice thrilling him.

"If you come to meet me," he says, voice unusually rough, "I will let them go."

She is struck dumb, unable to believe it would be so easy. No doubt he had something planned, her genius-lunatic of a love, but there was really no choice. Her life for the People's. Of course she says yes. She has nothing else to say to him now, and even though she does not trust him, she cannot resist. For he may hold all the cards, but she holds some of her own, the ace and the joker and the splendid queen of hearts.

_xx_

He makes the call from her bedroom in the underground base, only minutes after soldiers have stormed it and taken the few fairies captive. He had planned the attack, and so naturally it had gone off without a hitch - Artemis had discovered, after Holly's departure, a certain talent for war that surprised neither him nor anyone else. It gave him pleasure, a light, fleeting pleasure that had neither come close to nor even touched the happiness Holly had given him, but it had been enough to sustain him, just a little, since she had gone.

He hears her voice for the first time in too many years, and the sound of it creates within him a resonance that begins deep in some primal place inside him and lurches out to expand within his entire body. He is faltering, uncertain, when in conversation with her - he hates his own dependence on her, and yet the fluttering in his stomach and the lead weight in his chest would deny it. She agrees to his terms but he can feel the fire in her, feeling its scorch even as he longs for the cool softness of her spirit to obliterate the past.

The conversation is over too quickly for him, and for the first time he wonders if she no longer feels anything for him. Oh, once - once upon a nightmare time - he had been certain she needed him as much as he needed her. But he cannot think of that now, not here, in this room where she breathes and sleeps and lives, his body reacting to being so close to her even as his mind analyses her every word, every breath.

His breath hitching, throat burning, heart coiling up so tight in his chest… she's so close to him, here, she's so close, and he hurts for it.

He sits down in her bed in the little underground base, the room she shares with Opal, and nearly smiles. War makes such strange allies. But the smile falls away from his face, sliding like melted plastic. She is not here, but he lifts the pillow to his face, inhaling the scent of her that lingers. It has changed, only a little, but it is still her, still the scent of the only creature left on this earth who understands, even a little, his twisted and faltering genius. With her he can fix it. With her he can fix it all.

The scent of her wraps around him, pulling him into the dream-like bliss of being with her, and only with great determination does he shake it off. He has to see her, after all, and it will not do for her to arrive before him - he does not want to give her time to change her mind.

_xx_

It is too familiar, too ugly and too fresh, but she meets him where it all began.

The oak tree is damaged and destroyed, the acorns long since gone. The humans had taken care to obliterate as many sites for potential Rituals as possible, but they could not take away the winding river or the silver disc in the sky. She revels in the familiarity of it, and mourns the death of the great tree.

Artemis is waiting by the ruined tree, the glint of the moon reflecting off the silver threads in his hair. She frowns a little under her helmet. When did Artemis get old? Get those faint wrinkles around his eyes, the gray sprinkled in his black hair? She touches down with barely a sound, and his eyes do not leave her as she turns off her wings and removes her helmet.

Regulations do not matter anymore. The LEP is destroyed and she has slept with the enemy. She cannot decide whether this or the fact she cannot care about it is worse. No. Worse it the way she wants to run her fingers through that hair, kiss away those delicate lines of time. Worse is the way she wants him to touch her.

"You came," he says, that familiar glint in his eyes. But she is not afraid. How could she be, when she sees the strain her absence has left on him, like the footprints of time have left shadows on his face? He did not state the obvious before.

"Of course," she replies, voice brittle. "I had no choice." his smile is both weary and wonderfully, achingly, horribly tender. He never smiled at her like that before.

"There is always a choice, Holly," he sighs, and the sound his voice makes of her name sends ripples of nameless emotions down her body. She can't help but agree with him; hates the way the words she thinks can spill from his lips. The ties that bind them together are made of light and flame and cold that burns.

"Will you let them go now?" she asks, suddenly tired of being here with him. His lips twist - _i want to kiss you but if i do then i might miss you _- and that expression can't be a smile but it is.

"I already have," he replies, and she can see the truth of it in him. "I had no interest in them."

She spits venom at him, crimson creeping up around the edges of her vision. "You ruined our lives," she growls at him. "Don't you dare say you don't care, damn you!"

His eyebrow lifts - he is so cool, so calm, but the hairline fractures in him are always more pronounced when she is angry. "I never said I didn't care," he remarks. "Merely that they hold no interest for me."

Her anger remains but it cools, hardening into something much more deadly. She wants to ask him so bad, that one question she never could, too afraid of the answer. She wants to know the why, the reason he blamed her for the deaths that even now weigh him down below the ground. But she can't. Of course she can't. To ask him would be to tell him how it had been haunting her all these years. But she can't stop it, the words burning up out of her throat to shoot themselves at him, arrows of poison and grief.

"Why'd you do it, Artemis?" she asks, too tired to push and yet too angry to let it go. He destroyed their world, obliterated their trust. The fallout of the war had altered both the fairy and human world forever, millennia of fairy culture gone without a trace, and the human world forced to examine its own flawed morality. The xenophobia that had followed the revelation of fairy existence had opened the eyes of the Mud People to their own mercilessness. And they had not liked it.

"I wanted you to hurt," he replies, and her heart tingles with that old familiar affection/repulsion. For a moment, even the gray in his hair and the weariness life has written on him cannot disguise his vulnerability, the fragility of his genius. Holly remembers an old human tale, about a boy who ran away from the world and never grew up. Artemis has grown up, is a man grown, but somewhere within him is the damaged boy who watched everything he loved die. In a way, she's always known this.

And now? Now her world is altered forever, her friends dead or changed into strangers by war and hunger and death. All she has left to her now is him, the traitor, the destroyer, the creature she has fought against loving for so long now. Why fight it any longer, when the Artemis who destroyed her world is a different Artemis to the one who stands before her, eyes brimming with liquid doubt.

No, no. Holly is tired of fighting. She isn't going to fight him anymore, not when it only hurts them both. She's had enough wounds to last her the eternity she's not going to have with him, and that's okay. That's how it should be.

She strips off her wings and pulls him against her, her face pressed against his stomach, breathing in his scent on the soft fabric of his immaculate suit. She feels more than hears his harsh intake of breath at the strength of her embrace. He's thinner than she recalls, she notices, far too thin, when his shoulders shake above her as he drops to his knees. He slides down to kneel against her, locked within her embrace. His head bends to her shoulder, tucks in the crook of her neck and nuzzles her throat.

He is not the man who tormented and injured her, who ruined her life and caused the war that slaughtered her friends. He is just as broken as her, and she knows it was not meant to go like this, that fate had had different ideas but people had been too stupid to listen. But maybe a little of that could be undone, some good could come of the nightmare the world had become. She is willing to try. And maybe Artemis is too. His ragged breath and the dampening of her shirt tells her the things he never learned how to say, his elegant hands twining with her damaged ones, her body carrying all the injury of his soul.

So she lets him cry against her shoulder, and she gives up on the words she never really knew how to say anyway. There is no point to recrimination and blame, not now, when he is finally feeling the price for what he has done.

He is still holding all the cards, balancing them on his fingers and keeping them hidden from her, but it hardly matters anymore. The cards she held in return lie scattered on the floor, forgotten, as she cups her own hands and holds together his heart.

_xx_

He is on his knees before her, and the grief bubbles up out of him like water from a spring. He cannot recall mourning like this ever before, and with every sob he feels something leave him, as though a great weight he has never known rested on him is being siphoned away. And she merely holds him, quiet and steady, the anchor of his life even now holding him firm.

When he finally can stop sobbing, he lifts his head and meets her eyes. He looks at her, truly looks. She is tired and beaten and scarred, the Holly Short he once knew nearly buried beneath the Holly he knows now. But he has a feeling the tiny elf who had punched him and hugged him and befriended him even when he deserved it least is still there.

She draws his head up from where it has been resting against her body, her small fingers on either side of his throat, brushing against his ears and sinking their little fingertips into his hair. "Look," she says, pointing towards the great, ruined oak. He looks closer, seeing where she points, the tiny buds on the mammoth dead tree. New life, springing from the ancient dead.

He buries his face in her hair, almost unable to bear this. She has not forgiven him, and she likely never will, but for a short while, she will let him forget what he has done. The sweetness of her lips against his is a long-forgotten penance, and as she bears him down to the cool, inviting earth, stripping his suit from his body with long-practised hands, he thinks he would like to atone for his sins forever, so long as she remains.

She writes forgiveness on his skin, tracing Gnommish swirls and English spikes among a hundred other languages. Love, always love, and he shivers under her, giving in totally to the magnificence of her, to the silvery pink scars that map her dark skin. He remembers giving many of them to her, and it arouses him ridiculously - he kisses a path down every familiar wound, and then the ones that are not. And the forgiveness in the rhythm of her motion and the movement of her body is enough to set his world back on its axis, to make the moon and stars and sun all move in a design he recognises once more.

He sleeps, eventually, and she whispers to him while he slumbers the names of every living creature the war killed that she can recall, that his grief murdered one way or another, and when he wakes they flee the coming sunlight, her holding his hand as though afraid he will not be able to stand on his own.

It is not peace. It is not as he imagined; he wanted her crawling back to him for forgiveness, for the grand crime of leaving him. But instead she is his master, she is the one who holds the cards. This is not what he had wanted.

But. Oh, but.

This is not what he had wanted. If he thinks about it honestly, its really more than he deserves.

So he lets it be enough.

* * *

Thank you for reading, duckies! :) There should be one more installment in this series, so stay tuned...

And please forgive the typos, if they're there. :)


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